Posts by Paul 139

Quite right.

Another person in strong agreement here.

My old battery Acer Aspire One is still after 5 years my primary choice for travel. Although only £210 new, it's been treated to a few upgrades over the years; a new 1366x768 screen to bump up the resolution (£75) an SSD when the rotary rust failed (£80), an extra gig of RAM (£10),Windows 7 (£50) and a bigger battery (£20).

Adding this up, I see I've got a £500 device now rather than a £200 one - not too far off the cost of a similarly specced new device.

Advert style seems to indicate the product(?) is aimed at younger teenagers. I'm pretty sure the A.S.A. slapped the wrist (lightly of course, being the A.S.A.) of a several banks a few years ago for pushing 'easy credit' at this demographic. Morality aside, facebook-style data exposure and banking is a combination to make most wince. Prime source of targets for the fraudsters if nothing else.

Every single one of the games on this list is a sequel, follow-up or remake of an earlier game, I refuse to believe nothing both new *and* good was released this year. Time to seek out Andrew Bailey 2, methinks.

Not happened yet?

Not all bad...

At least the FIT is tied to power production (rather than just a plain old grant to install) - inappropriate installations will take decades to pay back, whereas genuinely useful ones will recoup costs in perhaps 10 years.

Gadzooks!

90% of email messages were spam last year and only 75% this year - that's a huge improvement. Stating the figures that way does a disservice really; 90% means that for every useful message sent there were 9 spams. If just 75% of email sent is spam now, that equates to only 3 spams per useful message. Are we really only getting a third of the spam we did last year ?

Roomba?

I told you so?

This might be the most depressing thing I'll read today. Thousands (or tens of) dead and a truly awful disaster unfolding before our eyes. And what does someone post .. "this just shows that technology X sucks, I told you so!".

Go collect some canned food, or done some money or pray or do whatever the hell else might just help your fellow human beings Mr Phud. I know I will be.

New faster Javascript engine!

Why are all the latest releases accompanied by claims of new and faster Javascript engines? Is this really the performance bottleneck during the average persons web-surfing experience? Pretty much all of the websites I visit work well with NoScript active. Perhaps Javascript speed is simply an area in which marketing-friendly percentages are easy to generate whereas rendering speed/correctness, stability and security are too intangible to rave on about.

Not that unusual

To replicate: Install vista from a pre-SP1 source - for example a factory restore DVD supplied with a 3-year old PC. Patch using windows update until no more updates are available. On the final reboot, the scenario depicted occurs.

Optical drive ?

Legal firesharing

Oh no, no again. My firm uses a gnutella-derived p2p app for propagating a large decentralized store of lefgal documents from and to its hundred or so field agents. Around a third have had warning letters from their home (and in a few cases mobile) ISPs regarding their use of 'illegal file sharing software', along with threats of disconnection and legal sanctions.

If ISPs can't differentiate between 'illegal file sharing' and just 'encrypted stuff on port 6346', is plod really going to do any better ?

Too risky to use.

Old PII tower, RAID/network cards as needed, a handful of HDDs and FreeNAS. Although a few pounds less to buy and more hours work to set up initially, being able to fix the damned thing when it breaks is worth (often literally) thousands.

Diesel Hybrid

greeno99; Diesel engines are 'expensive' to start and stop in terms of fuel and wear and tear compared to petrol/LPG/gas burners. Hybrids tend to start and stop their dead-dinosaur-to-kinetic energy converters quite often in response to varying power requirements - foot down, engine on, steady speed, off again.